Young kids get angry a lot and, because they are young kids, they act out their anger. This can make parenting more than a little challenging. At these times, it’s helpful to think of anger as a secondary emotion—“secondary” because there are other emotions that are driving the anger. When parents can identify these primary, source emotions, they can more easily manage their child’s anger and any resulting behavior.
Think of anger as useful
Though physical pain is unpleasant, it’s actually a useful thing. For instance, when we touch a hot stove, we yank our hand away. If we didn’t react quickly to the pain, we’d get badly burned. In this way, pain protects us: it’s our body’s way of telling us something isn’t right.
And so it is with anger.
Just like pain, anger is the alarm bells sounding inside us. We may not be able to identify what it is that’s wrong, but we feel it in our gut and we get mad. In this way, anger as a secondary emotion is our heart’s way of saying, “Make things right.”
Every child who is angry has a good reason to be angry
There, I said it. Don’t hate me for it!
I, too, am a parent, and I know what it’s like to deal with a child who is furious about who-knows-what, and there’s no way to reason with him, especially as his anger starts spinning out of control.
But for a moment, let’s put aside our kid’s behavior.
He’s angry because in his experience, someone or something hurt him or wronged him.
(The key here is how our child experiences something, not us. Whether we think he’s justified in being angry, his experience and perception of what happened is making him feel wronged in some way.)
In the end, we need to accept his anger—his behavior isn’t necessarily acceptable, but his feelings are.
The core reasons kids get mad
Let’s take a deep dive and get at the heart of the matter.
If we accept anger as a secondary emotion—that other emotions are causing the anger—we need to find those source emotions. Here’s a list of the common reasons—and the associated emotions—that kids get mad.
They feel a loss of connection
The connection and bond your child feels with you—or anyone else he’s close to—is perhaps the most essential piece of his emotional well-being. It’s this bond with you that tells him he’s loved and loveable. This connection greatly determines his present—and especially his future—mental health. (Stay tuned for the upcoming post, “How Connecting With Your Child Creates Crucial, Lifelong Narratives.”)
While this connection is so important to children, they often have trouble naming its absence, though they may be able to identify the accompanying sadness. Still, this loss of connection is often a core reason kids get angry.
The loss of connection happens in any number of ways. It happens when you answer a text while playing with your child. It happens when you have a new baby in the family. It happens when you discipline your child, or when you lose your cool and yell, or when you simply withdraw because you’re feeling sad, overwhelmed, or exhausted. It happens when you don’t do something you said you’d do and your child feels betrayed. It happens every night when you put her to bed.
(Yes, a break in connection happens all the time, and that’s an inevitable part of parenting. Still, there’s a lot you can do about it, as covered in the post, “Ruptures and Repair: the 4 Steps You Need to Know.”)
They feel helpless, powerless, or lacking control
Kids are tiny beings in a world of giants—and they know it!
Naturally, they feel small, as well as helpless and powerless. There’s very little they can do about this, which makes them feel all the more helpless. They are constantly having to confront and manage feeling small and powerless, and when it becomes too much for them, they get mad.
Similarly, they know they control very little in their world, including controlling their own bodies, their behavior, and even their own feelings. (Sometimes they get mad simply because their feelings become too intense and overwhelm them.)
Additionally, feeling so powerless can make them scared. Like anger as a secondary emotion, fear becomes a secondary emotion, too, driven by their feeling so small. Anger then becomes a wonderful solution to this terrible, momentarily incurable condition. Anger can make kids feel quite large and powerful, especially when their anger—and its accompanying behavior—makes parents uncomfortable or scared.
For the child, his anger (and scary behavior) is an excellent way to manage his fear: if someone else is now scared, he no longer needs to feel afraid. (For more on this subtle yet profound way that kids transfer their feelings to others, check out this must-read, “A Key Technique Therapists Use to Figure Out Kids.”)
They feel shame or humiliation
Unlike guilt which is the feeling that we’ve done something bad, shame is the feeling that we are bad. Similarly, when we feel humiliated, our sense of self-worth diminishes. When kids feel shame or humiliation, they feel something is wrong with them at their core, and they question whether they are worthy of love and acceptance. Naturally, this can generate all sorts of reactions and emotions, including anger.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you catch your usually mild-mannered six-year-old in the act of cutting out the eyes of Pookie the Panda, his three-year-old sister’s favorite stuffy.
“What are you thinking?” you shout in horror and shock, imagining how your daughter will be a total wreck. “Do you know how much she loves Pookie? How could you?”
Your son stares at you in disbelief, then suddenly lifts his head and wails as if beaten. He throws the scissors across the room and comes at you, fists beating the air, screaming bloody murder.
So, what has just happened? How has this gentle child turned into an eye-gouging terror who is now about to attack you?
For whatever reason, he’s taking out his feelings (likely for his sister) on her panda bear, and as you confront him, he’s overwhelmed with his own feelings of shame and guilt. Your comments—the “how could you?”—only intensify these feelings.
And why the anger? He’s raging at himself for hurting his sister/Pookie, and he’s furious at you for confirming his belief that he’s a bad child.
Helping kids manage their anger
1 Control your response. The first step is to make sure you’re in a good place to deal with your child’s anger. After all, losing your cool when your child has lost his only makes matters worse. (See “What Our Kid Experiences When We Lose Our Cool.”)
2 If necessary, set limits around safety. If your child is behaving in ways that are clearly unsafe to you, himself, or others, you’ll need to set limits around his behavior. It can be helpful to first remind your child that if he can’t control his body, you’ll need to step in to do so. Sometimes, this encourages your child to get control of himself without your help.
3 Speak to the underlying emotions that are driving your child’s anger. This is the core piece of helping your child manage his anger. If you understand what’s driving the anger and you name it for your child, you’re bringing his feelings into the open where he can more readily deal with them. This tends to calm his acting out behaviors because he won’t feel the same urgency to express his feelings through his behavior. (It may be helpful to review the post, “The All-Important Link Between Feelings and Behavior.”)
For example, after a difficult bedtime, here’s what a parent might say as she tucks her child into bed:
“Instead of book time before bed, you wanted to play hide and seek. But I wasn’t willing to do that. You got frustrated and refused to read with me for a while. When you eventually agreed, we only had time for one book, not our usual three or four. And that made you really mad.
“But I think that more than feeling mad, you were actually feeling sad. You were sad that you missed out on having more time with me reading books. And I think you also get sad at bedtime because it means we have to say goodnight and be separate. I get it. That can make you sad even though you know we’ll see each other in the morning.”
For a deeper dive into talking to kids about their emotions, see these two posts, “Naming Emotions: A Key Part of Successful Parenting” and “Voicing Your Child’s Emotions: the Direct Approach.”
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